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<!--While I deflate my lungs inflating an ultralightweight sleeping pad, Glen uses his hands to press contours into the ground, sculpting concave sections for his head and ass, convex for his lumbar and cervical spine. He pulls a thin foam pad (a quarter-inch thick, at most) from the lining of his backpack. It provides cushion, ventilation, and added warmth at night while he?s on the trail. He lays it on the ground where his torso will rest. Other than this touch of comfort, Glen likes to sleep directly connected to the earth and only rarely walls himself off from nature with a tent. He believes that the less we carry, the deeper we go. Life gets simpler. When the only thing we need to worry about is the next water source, it reminds us of who we are. These were the founding principles of Gossamer Gear. It is cold that first night. Frost sets in early, not long after the tequila has worn off. My freezing breath clouds the view outside the face hole of my mummy bag. Obviously, an ultralightweight nylon tent like Ed?s or Ben?s would not keep me warm, but it would wall me off from the demons that keep me awake. A friend once told me a story about a bat that landed on his face while he was asleep, covering his eyes with its wings. I spend the first hour staring up at the black sky, scanning, until I realize it?s too dry and cold here for bats. Soon my eyes drift beyond the sky?where the bats would be if there were bats?and I focus light-years away into the great void of space and existence. That?s usually a good way to kill the rest of the night. What is out there? Where does it all end? Does it all end? What does it all mean? Who am I? Why am I? And finally, Am I?
Thankfully, through the darkness, I hear Glen chewing and crunching his seven coffee beans. My sleepless night has come to an end. Ten feet from my sleeping bag, he is up, standing ramrod straight, his pack cinched, his poles gripped, and his shirt tucked in, ready. It?s before 5:00 A.M. The air has the muffled, antiseptic smell of frozen sage?more freezer burn than living plant. While Glen waits, the rest of us pack our gear and prepare for the trail in a way that is far from efficacious. It resembles a French bedroom farce. We all have our own abject fear of this hike?duration, blisters, hunger, worthiness, injury, drowning, the WAG bag, keeping pace with Glen Van Peski, maybe even impressing Glen Van Peski. To alleviate those fears, or just stumble around them, we take our time, hang close to the cars, visit and revisit the parking lot outhouse?unlike the WAG bags, it has a seat and locking door. We boil water, chase our garbage, eat a hot breakfast, have one last coffee for the road, relace our boots, repack the Gorilla, one more last coffee for the road, and again one more last time to the outhouse. Having used up all our delaying tactics, we finally fill our water reservoirs. The next fresh drinking water is 20 miles away, and we?ll each need five liters to make it through the day. My pack instantly grows heavier. The sun has been up for hours when we finally set foot into Wire Pass, the gateway to Buckskin Gulch. It must have felt like a year to Glen. The group makes their way up the canyon on Day one through freezing water. The group making their way up the canyon through freezing water (David McLain)
Cold Feet
As we stroll those first easy steps along a dry riverbed, Glen prepares us for the realities of the hike. Numbers. The elevation is 4,872 feet; longitude is 112� 1? 29.52? W and latitude 37� 1? 8.76? N. He explains that a rainstorm more than 50 miles away can send 100-foot walls of water in a flash, moving at nine feet per second through the canyon. If it rains while you?re in there, you basically risk death not so much by drowning but by becoming a pinball bouncing from side to side down the canyon at 400 miles per hour while uprooted trees and boulders the size of Italian cars bear down on you. Not exactly an invitation. But when we turn into the first of the Buckskin slots?
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If I write 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 words, they would not begin to capture the beauty and wonder and spirituality and complexity and triumph that is Buckskin Gulch. And if I take a picture that is really, really good, it won?t begin to capture the true essence of the feeling that washed over me, like a flash flood without warning, when we came around the bend, left Wire Pass behind, and entered the legendary swirling red rocks that define the canyon. Their ancient, water-carved shapes simulate movement; they look like a combination of wedding cake frosting, the journey of our own birth, and Jabba the Hutt licking his lips.--->
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<!--It?s disorienting. Or is it more accurately described as orienting?
As we approach the first of the canyon?s many cesspools, Glen explains the source of the muck we?re about to navigate. During summer monsoons or when wintertime low-pressure systems move across the region, flows through Buckskin Gulch can swell from barely a trickle to more than 8,000 cubic feet per second. The rushing wall of water sculpts the canyon walls and deposits logjams in the narrows. The flood can dissipate as quickly as it developed The next season, snags larger and more intricate than well-engineered beaver dams hover ominously five stories above the heads of hikers down below on the path. But some of the stormwater lingers for months, in red mud cesspools that form where the sun doesn?t shine. The depth of these cannot be discerned by the naked eye. You walk through and hope. A stubborn, thin layer of ice from the night before coats the surface. Your hiking pole pokes gently ahead, breaks the ice, and tells you if the water is too deep. If it?s too deep, you find a way to move forward anyway, because you don?t go back. You keep up with Glen Van Peski. We wade through these pools with increasing frequency?at times there is one nearly every 100 steps. My wet and frozen shoes never have the chance to dry or thaw. Several ice-covered cesspools later, my feet are numb and my attitude is not so much poor as unresponsive. I wonder if I?m the only one suffering. McConaughey tells a story that ends with ?alright, alright, alright.? You?ve heard those three words spoken many times in films and many more times by frat boys standing next to the keg, but never like this, straight from the source. McConaughey laughs at his own story. Everyone laughs. My brain is too muddled and vague to connect the punch line to the setup. I am the only one suffering. Glen is ahead, looking over his shoulder, worried about water and daylight and which of us will need to be airlifted out of the canyon. We pause to rest in a sunny cove and hope the breeze will dry our pants, if not our shoes Dan offers sustenance in the form of homemade trail mix?a blend of oats, nuts, dried fruit, coffee grounds, and olive oil. The plastic bag he carries it in is bigger than a basketball. He hands it to me. Now that I understand that everything weighs something, I know this bag is clearly heavier than Glen?s entire base pack. We arrive at rockfall, a narrows in the canyon whose terrain shifts with every flood. Boulders and trees from this year?s flood become intertwined with boulders and trees from previous floods. It is theoretically possible that a strong storm season could render rockfall impassable. But that?s never been true for Glen Van Peski. Though he doesn?t initially see the obvious passage, Glen makes no move, as I hoped, to locate the keys in his pack and return to the cars. To the layperson?s eye (mine), getting to the other side of rockfall is more than a significant challenge. It looks like a wall, not a path. It is a bottleneck of boulders, rocks, entire trees, stumps, branches, goat carcasses, and other debris?it looks like an illustration of entropy, covered in a shock of Medusa?s hair Like a downhill ski racer before a run, Glen imagines the impassable to be possible. If, in his mind, he hits danger, he retreats and draws another route. He finally spies the clear path. We strap on our packs. We go high, then we go low. Over and under rocks. We use rope, poles, and each other for acceleration, ballast, and brakes. Someone in the group describes our effort as ?generally heroic.?--->
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